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Prayers

Help us to believe in beginnings, O God, to make a beginning, to be a beginning, so that we may not just grow old, but grow new each day of this wild, amazing life you call us to live with the passion of Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray.

You are the voice we can scarcely hear because you speak to us about dying and suffering, and we are impacted by so many voices that have to do with power and competence and success

We do know that you are the voice that gives life, that you are the voice that opens futures to people who are hopeless.

We are a part of a hopeless people, because the other voices eat at our hearts, and we are immobilized and we become deaf

So we pray for new ears.

We pray that your voice may be more audible to us, that we may be able to sort out the death-giving from the life-giving voices among us. Amen.
–Walter Brueggemann (from Awed to Heaven)

We are strange conundrums of faithfulness and fickleness. We cleave to you in all the ways that we are able. We count on you and intend our lives to be lived for you, and then we find ourselves among your people who are always seeking elsewhere and otherwise. So we give thanks that you are the God who yearns and waits for us, and that our connection to you is always from your side, and that it is because of your goodness that neither life nor death nor angels nor principalities nor heights nor depths nor anything in creation can separate us from you. We give thanks for your faithfulness, so much more durable than ours. Amen.
–Walter Brueggemann

God of all truth, we give thanks for your faithful utterance of reality. In your truthfulness you have called the world “very good.” In your truthfulness you have promised, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” In your truthfulness you have assured, “This is my beloved Son.” In your truthfulness you have voiced, “Fear not, I am with you.” In your truthfulness you have guaranteed that “Nothing shall separate us from your love in Jesus Christ.” It is by your truthfulness that we love. And yet we live in a world where we call evil good and good evil, where we put darkness for light and light for darkness, where we call bitter sweet and sweet bitter, where we call war peace and peace war, so that we rarely see the truth of the matter. Give us courage to call things by their right name, to use things for their right use, to love our neighbor as you love us, that we may be tellers of truth and practitioners of truth. We pray in the name of the One whom you have filled “with grace and truth.”

Just when we imagine that we have you figured out you show up working the other side of the street in your frightening freedom. You meet us behind and before as promise and as threat, and we are overmatched whenever we sit to deal with you. So we bid you to pay less vigorous attention to us and we bid you to give us the freedom and courage that we may withstand you in ways that are proper to you and to us. We pray in the name of the utterly humble One whom you therefore exalted. Give us wisdom and freedom that we may sense the ways in which we may best live in this world where the last become first and the first become last. Amen.
— Walter Brueggemann (from Awed to Heaven)